Likely to warm hearts, especially if read within sight of a nicely trimmed tree. But its shelf life will last about as long...
A children’s writer spins a grown-up fable about a sleepy village that had a white Christmas—and was changed forever.
Nestled below Old Rag Mountain, Ryland Falls is home to barely three thousand souls, quiet folk who go about their business from day to day and year to year with little change in their routines. Ed Crimmins, the wealthy clockmaker, manages his company with Swiss precision, to such an extent that he sometimes neglects his wife Olivia and son Neddie. Newcomer Will Campbell teaches art classes at the local public school and tries to paint his own canvases in his spare time. The widower Giovanni lives alone with his dog Max on his evergreen farm, harvesting trees for Christmas and trying to forget the deaths of his wife Lucia and son Carlo. Although Ryland Falls is not a great place for the creative and the unorthodox, it is picturesque and capable of providing inspiration to those sensitive enough to notice the beauty around them—artists like Will Campbell and young Neddie Crimmins, for example, or poets like 11-year-old Miranda Bridgeman. Christmas is usually a big thing in Ryland Falls, but this year for some reason no one has the heart for it: The decorations go up as usual, but the spirit just isn’t there. Late in December, however, a blizzard strikes, knocking out the electricity and bringing everyone in town together for warmth and comfort. Even in a place as quiet as Ryland Falls, it helps to slow down for a change and take stock of things, and by the time the power is back everyone has learned the value of the people—and the place—around them.
Likely to warm hearts, especially if read within sight of a nicely trimmed tree. But its shelf life will last about as long as fresh eggnog or raw chestnuts.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-4433-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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